


an american girl raised on promises

by rillrill



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/F, Gen, Gender or Sex Swap, Internalized Misogyny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-12
Updated: 2015-05-12
Packaged: 2018-03-30 06:07:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3925696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillrill/pseuds/rillrill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Sam is twenty-eight when she realizes that moving ahead in her field means becoming the worst kind of person. As much as she feels the pressure to ice over, to form a steel-plated exoskeleton, she can’t do it. She tosses and turns and eventually calls Josh Lyman.</i>
</p><p>Always-a-girl!Sam gender swap AU. Exactly what it says on the tin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	an american girl raised on promises

**Author's Note:**

> So I'm hardly the first person to write gender-swapped Sam Seaborn, but I've never seen it done in the way that piques my interest (and in the way that I think might have solved many of my issues with Sam as a character in the first place) - I wanted pretty idealistic lesbian Sam who is still somewhat problematic in regards to interactions with women, and so that's what I wrote.

Samantha Seaborn is eleven years old when she nearly drowns. She grows up on the beach as if it’s her birthright. She learns to surf at eleven, and is paddling out on her board when a wave knocks her off and a riptide pulls both her board and herself underwater, and it’s by the grace of an eagle-eyed lifeguard that she survives it at all. She coughs the water out of her lungs and is reborn, baptized by terror and emerging, unwavering and indestructible in the face of fire.  
  
She’s never afraid of fire but the riptide still scares her and in a few years, she takes up sailing instead, to put a little space between her and the currents.  
  
  
  
Sam Seaborn is thirteen when she realizes the extent to which beauty matters. She comes home from summer camp with a tan and her hair grown out three inches and her breasts gone up two cup sizes and suddenly everyone pays attention to her. She walks into eighth grade and wins the class presidency without campaigning. At first it seems like everyone’s listening when she speaks, but soon it becomes pressingly, upsettingly clear that they’re only nodding along and looking at her. She can say almost anything in conversation without much pushback, and that’s when she discovers her gift for rhetorical flair, embellishing sentences with SAT-prep vocabulary words for fun and talking circles around the boys and the male teachers who don’t seem to notice that she’s saying anything at all.  
  
She gets the sense that people resent her for this. Girls, especially. She can’t trust girls because they don’t seem to like her. They call her arrogant, conceited, bitchy when she speaks without hesitation. She’s not unpopular, but she senses that could change at any day. So she takes pains to make herself more affable. She trips over her own feet and smiles at the end of every sentence and tells other people how much she likes them constantly. She negotiates power for likability and finds that life – and high school – will be easier this way.  
  
Sam is fifteen when she thinks she likes a girl, but she doesn’t act on it for years. She busies herself with not dating at all; dating leads to sex which leads to mistakes, pregnancies, things that will keep her stuck in Orange County for years. She throws herself into extracurriculars, runs for homecoming princess (which she wins) and then prom queen (which she doesn’t), organizes bake sales and leads the debate team and the student council and gets her braces off and drives a white Mustang and gets a near-perfect score on the SAT. She’s nice to everyone because she believes she has a responsibility to do so.  
  
She’s seventeen when she gets hold of a slam book that’s been going around the school and flips, immediately, to her own page. “Sam Seaborn doesn’t put out” is the first item, and it only goes on: “Know-it-all.” “Talks too much.” “Bitch!” “Kisses up to teachers.” “Frigid.” “A total prude.” “Really bossy.” “Not even that pretty.”  
  
  
  
She goes to Princeton. She joins the Gilbert & Sullivan Society and rushes a sorority and continues debating at the collegiate level. She gets into three law schools; she chooses Duke. She meets Lisa Sherborne when they’re seated next to each other alphabetically at a conference and falls deeply, stupidly in love for the first time. She edits the Duke Law Review and works for three different congressmen. She is offered a job at Dewey Ballantine the week after she passes the bar. She does the work; she forces herself to be likable because she’s deeply afraid, on the inside, that she’s not. She never stops smiling.  
  
  
  
Sam is twenty-eight when Josh Lyman shows up to recruit her for the Hoynes campaign. They share a hot dog and a cup of bodega coffee on a corner in midtown and reminisce about their congressional-page days before Josh gives her the hard sell. She says no. She’s gotten good at saying no to people.  
  
Sam is twenty-eight when Lisa breaks it off. She almost says “good riddance” but her heart is still too raw. But it’s okay. She can focus on work. She’s doing fine on her own. She’s about to be made partner. She compartmentalizes and deals with the pain and moves on, even though it sometimes feels like she’s missing a limb, the phantom pain of a relationship that still feels real.  
  
Sam is twenty-eight when she realizes that moving ahead in her field means becoming the worst kind of person. The oil tanker deal is the kind of thing most of her coworkers move past with a few rounds of drinks and a good night’s sleep, if they feel any kind of guilt at all. But she can’t do that. As much as she feels the pressure to ice over, to form a steel-plated exoskeleton to prove to the men she works with that she’s not _just another emotional woman_ , she can’t do it. She tosses and turns and eventually calls Josh Lyman.  
  
  
  
Sam is thirty and she’s working for the President of the United States, a man who makes her feel like anything is possible when she listens to him speak, a man who makes her dashed-off speeches sound like Shakespeare, a man who _she helped get elected_. Suddenly she has a reason to get up in the morning and go to work. Gage Whitney Pearce was never going to make her partner anyway; finally, she works in a place where her idealism, her emotions, her lofty expectations to which she hopes the rest of the country will rise, are embraced and treated as logical. Corporate law was never right for her. Not really.  
  
Sam loves Washington because it’s a city founded on words and ideas. The Constitution and the founding documents are as woven into its bedrock and foundation as any physical material could be. Washington as a city is a testament to what America can be, and when she pulls another all-nighter and finds herself watching the sunrise over the National Mall as she drives home to shower and change clothes, she doesn’t complain, because this is exactly where she should be, and it just feels right.  
  
Sam has just turned thirty-one when she accidentally sleeps with a call girl. That’s just what she does, at this point. Dating in this town is so fucking exhausting. She doesn’t wear her orientation on her sleeve because she knows she can’t. There are too many people even within her own party who would make it harder for her to get jobs.  
  
Sam hates Washington because of the fucking politics. Who you’re seen with, who you’re drinking with, who you’re sleeping with; they can all make or break a career in the time it takes for word to get around town. There are enough men who want to be seen with her that she can politely entertain most of them, flip her chestnut hair over her shoulder and pay for her own drinks and make it clear that she’s only here to talk business and certainly not pleasure. She tops three 40-under-40 lists in a single year and has drinks with many of the other shortlisted, but it’s always for sheer strategy talk on her part.  
  
She sleeps with Laurie because she wants to, and it turns out to be the dumbest thing she’s done all year; Josh and Toby give her shit and it nearly torpedoes her entire career before she manages to make it right. And by the end of it, she’s been forcibly outed to the entire town; everyone knows all about the personal life and inclinations of Samantha N. Seaborn, Bartlet’s golden girl, his wunderkind, his staff’s _token homosexual_. And it’s not even that anyone in the office really cares, because they don’t, but it’s what the people outside of those gates think that matters. At least she no longer has to hide the quavering passion in her voice when she argues against Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  
  
  
  
But she’s got her brothers, or at least, her brothers-in-arms. They pick on her as much as they love her and as much as she loves them. “Who’s your favorite writer?” people ask, and she’s being truthful when she answers, “Toby.” Because if Josh is the brother she’s grown up with, the guy with whom she must share half a brain by now, Toby’s the half-brother she’ll always want to impress. Toby’s as idealistic as she is; he just expresses it in disappointment more often than not.  
  
  
  
Sam is thirty-two when she meets a straight Republican from South Carolina and immediately can’t decide whether she’s smitten or deeply annoyed. Ainsley goes out of her way to declare her heterosexuality around Sam and argues against the ERA like she’s playing devil’s advocate back at Smith, but she’s also whip-smart and strikingly cute and often makes Sam feel like she’s finally got a worthy adversary to tangle with – she still hero-worships Toby too much, sometimes has a hard time digging into a debate with him because she’s so struck by his words, and she and Josh are just too much like brother and sister, their intellectual tussles always devolving into sarcasm and shenanigans. C.J. intimidates her on principle alone, and she doesn’t like to talk back to Leo at all, especially not after the failed business with his daughter. But the minute Ainsley kicks her ass on Capitol Beat, Sam feels _something_ kick inside her. It’s like being back in the eighth grade, girl-on-girl aggression with bigger words and higher stakes, and Sam feels threatened but she also feels alive.  
  
So it’s either defend her territory or befriend the enemy, and in the end she does the latter. The odd thing was that even in her desperate junior high days, she doesn’t remember ever _wanting_ the enemy like this one. Ainsley smells like expensive perfume that wafts through the corridor when they walk and talk together; Sam thinks she must spray it in her hair. Ainsley bites into peaches and wipes the juice messily off her chin and licks it from her fingers and Sam self-consciously averts her eyes because she can’t think about anything else. Everything about Ainsley is feminine, practiced yet effortless, and so goddamn _Southern_ , and she’s uncomfortable just standing next to her, because she can’t helping feeling that it highlights every little bump and flaw in her own rehearsed, performative femininity. It makes Sam seethe with competition but also marvel in awe, and sometimes she doesn’t know whether she wants to fuck Ainsley or _be_ her.  
  
Ainsley’s drunk when she kisses Sam in the steam pipe distribution room. Drunk and wearing a bathrobe and Eydie Gorme is blasting through a set of speakers Sam can’t even see. Drunk enough for plausible deniability the following day. Sam yields to the kiss for half a second before stepping back and being responsible, and then Bartlet ambles in and everything is shot.  
  
They act like it didn’t happen, but Sam hums “Blame It On the Bossa Nova” every once in a while when Ainsley’s banter gets a little bit too pointed.  
  
  
  
Sam is thirty-two. It’s Big Block of Cheese Day and she’s swimming upstream against all of her ideals at once, and it’s times like this that she wishes she could be cynical and underhanded.  
  
She wrote her thesis on Daniel Galt and now it turns out he’s not the man she thought he was. She outlined her life choices and goals based on the person she thought her father was; turns out he’s not that man, either. She doesn’t know why she does this. Men, powerful men, have always held sway over her, even though she knows it makes no sense. She desires their approval as much as she works to live up to their concept of her.  
  
Women are – they’re not disposable, she doesn’t hate them, but she doesn’t like to be one of several in the same room. She knows it makes her a traitor to the feminism she sunnily espouses, but deep down inside, she can’t deny that it’s true. Because in the world she’s come up through, there’s not much room for girl-power bonding. If there are seven people in a room and six of them are probably going to be men, she’s not going to stick her neck out on the line to add six more women and risk being cut from the room herself. Change happens through time and increments and legislation, she tells herself, which is why she supports the ERA and equal pay and maternity leave and still doesn’t particularly get along with Amy Gardner, who is exactly the kind of shrill, unlikable _feminist_ who gets women cut from the room altogether.  
  
Does that make her cynical on another level entirely? Perhaps, she thinks, halfway through her third glass of wine at the Hawk and Dove. But she’s got Josh and Toby on either side of her and they are her equals, and that’s never been in question. They care about her, they back her up in the ring, she looks up to them and strives to be on their level, and this is what is comfortable for her. Because if powerful men are only going to listen to a few top women, she’s going to be one of them, and trust the system to work in time.  
  
  
  
Sam is thirty-four when she runs for Congress.  
  
The California 47 th is a lost cause and she knows it. A lesbian Democrat will never win Orange County, no matter the odds. She made a promise and she’ll keep it because she’s not in the business of going back on her word, but even as she takes the red-eye from National to John Wayne, she knows it’s not going to work. She recommends Will Bailey as her replacement, sends him to D.C. in her place even though she knows he’s not as good as she is. She still sees herself in him. A man who can keep a dead man’s campaign afloat deserves better.  
  
She lets the riptide pull her under and this time she’s not sure she’ll ever resurface, choking and gasping for air.  
  
She came to D.C. a star ascendant, and she leaves without fanfare. She tells herself it’s okay. She’s a little older, a little more cynical. She’s tired of the weather, the humidity, the games and machinations. California would be nice. A little dry heat, a little familiarity. Maybe she’ll write a book. Maybe she’ll write several.  
  
Maybe the system just wasn’t for her.  
  
  
  
  
Sam is almost forty and she’s back in the White House, a little older, a little wiser. There’s a little more rust on her copper-penny enthusiasm but everyone is feeling wired and rejuvenated by the promise of – well, tomorrow.  
  
She’s Josh’s right hand, “the guy behind the guy,” the outline of their relationship taken to its logical endgame, and maybe this is all she ever really needed or should have expected from her career. She can do this. She’s done it before. She’s older, and wiser, and undoubtedly she’ll make more mistakes but she knows how to fix them now. The tides are turning, after all. Progress might not feel so Sisyphean this time around.  
  
“Are you ready?” Josh asks her on Inauguration Day, and she nods.  
  
“Born ready,” she says, and it’s at least half true. Maybe the whole truth.  
  
She’ll at least know how to keep her head above the waves.


End file.
